Unruliness through space and time: Reconstructing ‘peoplehood’ in the arab spring

Abstract

This chapter presents a critical account of the phenomenon of the ‘Arab Spring’. This it does via an unorthodox interpretation of why the Arab Spring élan represents a departure point from many 20th-century revolutions. Many scholars seek to find correlation between the Arab Spring and democratization. There might be hints at democratization within the Arab Spring. The focus here is on the dynamic of unruliness, defiance against and resistance to authoritarian rule, the common denominator in all Arab uprisings, whether successful (producing ousters in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen in 2011) or incomplete and/or bloody (Bahrain and Syria). The chapter therefore refuses to reduce democratic politics to a form of rule cemented to conventional templates and practices, invariably assumed to culminate in law-based contestation, participation and supportive civic publics and non-personalist systems that are contracted to either run government or organize orderly opposition periodically and peacefully. The argument presented in this chapter assumes this matrix of democratic politics to be an artefact integral to established and consolidated democracies. The gist of the account attempted here is to draw attention to an important aspect of political activity within the Arab Spring: the spatio-temporal dimension of the unruliness informing anti-authoritarian protest and resistance. The crux of this unruliness is public mobilization and organization through self-configuration and reconstructions of space and time. Rebellion against these two instruments of authoritarianism does not necessarily have a democratizing effect in an institutional sense. Unruliness is simply ‘occupation in reverse’ of spatial, temporal and discursive fields, which have for so long been constructed, reproduced and occupied by the postcolonial power-holders. In the quest for dignity (karamah) and freedom (hurriyyah), unruliness is society’s agential deployment against the ‘occupiers’ of the authoritarian state. Central to this unruliness, apart from informally engendering bottom-up notions of sovereign identities and participatory citizenship in the public squares of protest, is the people’s coming together to ephemerally substitute the authoritarian regimes’ practice, thought and language of controlling power with their own conceptions of political practice, thought and terminology. Thus the regimes’ routinized notions of stability, loyalty and deference, for instance, are traded for spontaneously conceived practices, thought and language. Stability cedes to fluidity, loyalty gives way to hostility and rebellion, and deference to resistance. To borrow a term from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, ‘critical consciousness’ is thus forged and invented in the public squares of protest as a necessity to counter the hegemonic order with action, thought and all kinds of signifiers of opposition and resistance (Freire 2000b). While instantaneous and spontaneous, the critical consciousness summoned in the public squares of protest seems to generate (e.g. Egypt and Tunisia in 2011) the necessary democratic agency to unify the rebellious publics around a spirit beckoning new beginning. The stand as a united public with unified practice, thought (perhaps dreams) and terminology constitute initial steps towards reconstitution of democratic subjectivities, and rejection of subjection to authoritarian rule and rulers. There are three distinct arenas where the Arab masses proved their supremacy over the authoritarian state in their bid to subvert the existing authoritarian paradigms: space, time and language. Two, in particular, explain the Arab masses’ triumph over their oppressors: the ability and creativity to occupy public space and refigure time itself. They are both the focus of the ensuing analysis. Space here means more than a geography or a public square; it is the ethos that derives from resisting authoritarianism, the thought-practice of emancipatory protest that engenders citizens in a state of flux, self-reconfiguring and in the process remapping the political. One caveat is in order: the chapter does not seek to explain the roots of the Arab Spring. Chomsky (2013), for instance, has a leftist take, implicating neoliberalism in the advent of the Arab Spring, which he describes as a ‘triple revolt’. He even goes further by crediting the ‘labour movement’ with Tahrir Square’s triumph in overthrowing the authoritarian regime (Chomsky 2013, 45-49). Negri concurs, showing his own leftist leaning in his interpretation of the Arab Spring. In his newly published Factory of Strategy, he links the origin of the Arab Spring with ‘a new cycle of anticipated struggles for the emancipation of labour, social equality and common freedom’ (Negri 2014, xi). Briefly, two observations derived from Harold Joseph Laski’s classic text, Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, are pertinent to understanding the roots of the Arab Spring. Writing about another epoch during World War II, and in describing the nature of the fundamental change conditioned by a state of massively destructive conflict, Laski notes that the revolution of his time ‘is not made by thinkers’ (Laski 1968, 9). He adds that ‘fear is the parent of revolution, for it inhibits that temper of accommodation which is the essence of successful politics’ (1968, 18). This relates to what he calls failure to recognize ʼnecessary social change’ (1968, 18). Laski’s observations may have some relevance, nearly 70 years later, to the nature of Arab revolutions: they are not ideational revolutions led by thinkers, reformers and philosophers (such as during the radical reforms sought in the 19th century by leading Arab and Muslim scholars of the Nahda Period); and the failure of politics to create genuine openings for social change and inclusiveness partly explain the advent of the Arab Spring, which for the Arab region is a match for the profound change Laski addresses. From the perspective of remaking peoplehood, the Arab Spring equals in significance the revolution of Laski’s time.